What has God got to do with drones?

“It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,”a United States major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to bomb and shell the town regardless of civilian casualties, to rout the Vietcong.

So began Peter Arnett’s 8 Feb 1968 report from the town of Ban Tre. Published in the New York Times under the headline “Major Describes Move“, time has improved the quotation to various forms of “we had to destroy the village to save it”. Questions of the proportionality of response to a threat have been present in war reporting from the start of the craft in the Nineteenth century to the present conflict in Afghanistan. However the questions raised by Peter Arnett have been debated for more than a millennium in the theological and philosophical speculations of “just war” theory.

The moral issues surrounding the use of unmanned drones has been been raised from time to time in the U.S. press and addressed by my colleague Mollie Hemingway on the pages of GetReligion. However, the European press has been particularly exercised over their use in the battle with the Taliban. Tuesday’s Guardian in London gave the issue the front page treatment in its story on the activation of an RAF squadron operating from Britain that will control drones flying over Afghanistan. However the Guardian approaches the issue of ethics without reference to religion.

The article entitled “UK to double number of drones in Afghanistan” begins:

The UK is to double the number of armed RAF “drones” flying combat and surveillance operations in Afghanistan and, for the first time, the aircraft will be controlled from terminals and screens in Britain.

In the new squadron of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), five Reaper drones will be sent to Afghanistan, the Guardian can reveal. It is expected they will begin operations within six weeks. Pilots based at RAF Waddington in Lincolnshire will fly the recently bought American-made UAVs at a hi-tech hub built on the site in the past 18 months.

Details of the new squadron’s operations are discussed and then the story moves to the moral issues involved in the use of unmanned drone attacks.

The use of drones has become one of the most controversial features of military strategy in Afghanistan. The UK has been flying them almost non-stop since 2008.

The CIA’s programme of “targeted” drone killings in Pakistan’s tribal area was last month condemned in a report by US academics. The attacks are politically counterproductive, kill large numbers of civilians and undermine respect for international law, according to the study by Stanford and New York universities’ law schools.

After raising the moral issues, the Guardian steps back somewhat and dives into eight paragraphs of operational details before resurfacing with this statement.

The MoD insists only four Afghan civilians have been killed in its strikes since 2008 and says it does everything it can to minimise civilian casualties, including aborting missions at the last moment. However, it also says it has no idea how many insurgents have died because of the “immense difficulty and risks” of verifying who has been hit. …In December 2010, David Cameron claimed that 124 insurgents had been killed in UK drone strikes. But defence officials said they had no idea where the prime minister got the figure and denied it was from the MoD.

Let me start off by commending the Guardian‘s reporter for raising the moral issues surrounding the targeted killing of America and Britain’s enemies. A story published the same day in the Washington Poston the administration’s plans to create kill lists of enemies was silent on the moral issues — though it did mention that there had been legal challenges to the government’s use of drones to kill American citizens in enemy ranks. As an aside, I am surprised by the lack of outrage over the targeted killing program from the press. America has been down this road before. The Phoenix program in Vietnam sparked congressional hearings and a steady flow of moral outrage up through the Carter Administration.

Was it sufficient for the Guardian to put forward the objections of some American law school professors when raising the moral issues of drone warfare? There are any number of philosophers and theologians who could have offered cogent critiques of the morality of drone warfare — Britain’s smartest man, the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams has been outspoken in his opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and has lectured on the issue of “just war” to military audiences. The choice of whom to quote, of course, lies with the author — but my sense of this story is that the religious element is outside the reporter’s knowledge. Ethics for the Guardian is not tied to religion.

This is, for me, is the journalism question in this story. There is an ethical ghost here — but what sort of ethical ghost, secular or religious?

The Christian tradition holds that morality without religion is impossible. There can be ethics without religion, but these ethics are necessarily incomplete or flawed. In his book Morality after Auschwitz, Peter Haas asked how Germany could have willingly participated in a state-sponsored program of genocide. His answer was that:

far from being contemptuous of ethics, the perpetrators acted in strict conformity with an ethic which held that, however difficult and unpleasant the task might have been, mass extermination of the Jews and Gypsies was entirely justified. . . . the Holocaust as a sustained effort was possible only because a new ethic was in place that did not define the arrest and deportation of Jews as wrong and in fact defined it as ethically tolerable and ever good.

If there is no God, there is no good and evil, no right and wrong, or as Fyodor Dostoyevsky said in the Brothers Karamazov, “If there is no immortality, then all things are permitted.”

Against this view we have philosophers and ethicists such as Prof. Peter Singer of Princeton University who have argued “that an intellectually coherent ethic has to be independent of religion and that’s an argument that goes right back to Socrates and Plato.”

Whether unconsciously or by choice, the Guardian has come down on one side of this argument. There is no God.

For those of us who are unpersuaded that there can be right or wrong without a God, should it have provided the arguments of religious ethics when addressing morality? Or should we take another newspaper?

What say you GetReligion readers? How should intelligent journalism address this question?

How many “religious ethics” should be consulted on moral questions, though? The U.K. has a state church, so there’s an argument for that one. Any other churches? Considering where these attacks are happening, should imams be consulted, too? Which ones?

Whether unconsciously or by choice, the Guardian has come down on one side of this argument. There is no God.

‘Whether right or wrong exists without God’ is logically distinct from the question of whether there is a God (or gods), though. (Too bad the “Coffehouse” is defunct. I’d love a good argument about the nature of morality and its relationship to god(s).)

http://www.liberatingdivineconsciousness.com Suzen Fontana

Get religion, morality, ethics, immortality, no God, drones, no regard for life, sounds like a tag line, yet there are more than multiple venues to comment here. To simplify, my perception is that life is sacred, this is a free willed sphere, human consciousness has nothing to do with a Supreme Being unless the alchemical process has afforded a connection, and human interplay and its aftermath has nothing to do with Spirit as long as the separate ego/mind is in control. I do not mean a perjorative slant for the ego, it too is important in the evolution of consciousness.

http://www.herely.com Herbert Ely

I’d like to see the reporter contact the US Conference of Catholic Bishops for a comment on use of drones from a just war perspective, particularly the criteria of legitimate authority. For that matter, I’d like to see a story on why the USCCB has been mostly silent on the whole issue.

John Penta

Herbert Ely: Without speculating too much, I’d wager the reasons the USCCB hasn’t commented is because the decision of tactics in war (presuming a just war) comes pretty close to being the ultimate in prudential decisions – and, more significantly, the programs are only known about in part, through leaks. Which is more significant than you seem to give credit for – decisions of theology (especially anything relative to Just War) are extremely fact-sensitive. So why should the bishops try to comment before they know the whole story?

http://www.ephesians4-15.blogspot.ca Randy

But are all the drone attacks part of a war effort? Some are anti-terrorism strikes. The process is secret. If you wait until you know the whole story you will wait a long time. Are there not moral principles to be articulate in this area? Seems like a cop out.

http://www.herely.com Herbert Ely

John, You may be right and the Bishops may be justified in their hesitation – even though we have had a strategy of pre-emptive attack since the Bush administration. I would like to see journalists asking questions about legitimate authority and last resort. The Bishops have issued statements, but they haven’t made the issue nearly as public as health care, or abortion.